I checked it out briefly. Can you give examples of when you would use this and not anywhere on the BB ? please. What advantages does it have? Is it only that, you can add to it using your phone? Does the forest have it's own receiving bit that is private - or do any additions become visible to anyone anywhere? Thank you.

I can see a microblogging account being useful. By far the most likely outcome is it gets ignored and never used. But it could be put to good use. For example if we have a big event that has a poster and lots of words, well obviously we want to put a full size blog post about it on our website. But if we have just an update about an event, or a smaller event going in the cafe that doesn't have a poster, a working group meeting, really any small piece of information that we want to announce, we could microblog it. Point is microblogging is very quick and easy to do, from a computer, from your phone, whatever, and quick to read also. The microblog feed could then be syndicated on the main website also.

What were you thinking about it Milk?

I also think that on our main site a tumblelog account, like one on tumblr or soup.io or our own self-hosted software, could be good for forest. It is very easy to do and we could put up blog posts, images, video, audio, all sorts. The free-form chaotic nature of tumblelogging seems more the forest's style than an orderly blog.

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I've had it with you. If I had an image of a laser gun I would absolutely position it right here in my hand...Ha! I have a real laser absolutely positioned in my hand!

@chombee; yes, a microblogging system using both identi.ca and twitter would be good and something to look towards implementing. i agree some form of activity stream of forest related news and resources online would be great to have. will be adding this to the roadmap.

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hey, if you don't like it, post on the BB (so you can ask about participating for better) | MilkMiruku

The other thing about microblogging is it gives us somewhere to post all sorts of relatively inconsequential notifications without making a mess of the front page of our main site, which we want to keep for big beautiful posters and photographs and other important things.

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I've had it with you. If I had an image of a laser gun I would absolutely position it right here in my hand...Ha! I have a real laser absolutely positioned in my hand!

christ, that video is the most depressing interpretation of communication I have ever seen (albeit kind of prettily done). Now you don't have to listen to your friends go ON AND ON about their lives. Just 140 characters should do it. Also, plz letz gt rd of ne Xtraneous ltrs, yuh? It's like a revolution in language. I can't wait. I'm stopping talking right now and going to tell my friends how much I love Van Halen...

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"We all tend to idealise kindness and tolerance, then wonder why we find ourselves infested with losers and nutcases." Sebastian Horsley

Just saw the vid, thanks Milk it was fun though it saddened me. What I do find sad, I got two emails from people wanting to 'follow' me the very next day after I made the briefest possible profile you can make - just a name. There was nothing to follow. Absolutely nothing. I guess that answers my Q about being able to limit it to a select audience too.

I think these people should have a rest from the phone and the blog, really , please have them get a glimpse at life in the sun, the wind. Not gonna happen I know. If only they could see green grass. Green grass inspires outdoor play/acivities I think and without it in easy sight, reaching for the inventions is the easy alternative.

I am too unfamiliar with the jargon, to follow reasons of when the forest can use this yet.

I've had a complete turn around about this...have I?...yes. I now think, that twittering the following things could be really good health & well being tips for people. To say:

"Just making my detox raw vegie juice" "got a spare hour to read the dictionary" "Going for a run with the dog" "Putting mung beans into soak overnight" "Putting extra cardamon into the chai on the stove" "Off for morning chai with the town elder to give him some hen eggs" "Just popping maca into the herb tea, instead of coffee today" "A spare hour for some more snuggling"

It is a big responsibility I think, having 'followers'. I don't like to be followed, but like my privacy. Tweetering could be called Pestering just as easily unless you really need or want to know...no? From memory I think I needed to add them, but this involved checking out their profiles and I just got distracted by more urgent emails. BYE

"running as fast as I can across the meadows" " I'm gonna help that old guy cross the street" "Popping into the forest to wash up or maybe I'll mop first while listening to a great band" "Just taking a Forest language class" "Dancing up a storm at the forest' "Signing up for some community volunteering abroad" "See a great tree I think I'll meditate under for an hour or so"

Mind you. the first one & the fifth, are not covered by the 'teetering' description in the video as 'inbetween the phone and the blogg' and is actually awaiting an invention for 'while you are doing it'. Perhaps one of you techno brains at the forest can launch a demo model - something that straps to your body, or arm, and somehow records your voice or thought patterns that is sent to the 'follower' inbetween your ability to 'tweeter' as you are on your way to the phone...

What I do find sad, I got two emails from people wanting to 'follow' me the very next day after I made the briefest possible profile you can make - just a name.

those are just spam accounts which can be ignored.

It is a big responsibility I think, having 'followers'

yes and no and yes and no then yes.

yes, as you're setting an example to the world in everything you do, no in that you should assume that people will know how to think for themselves and parse information they take in objectively, but yes as in the understanding that there are dumb people out there and that they may well take something the wrong way without seeking clarification where as you could have avoided this with better use of language, and no as in there is a pluralism of mindsets out there and who am i to try sway another's attitude but yes because ultimately one should be able to understand that some things are objective and some are subjective and there is a process of rationality to be had and that's a good stance to tweet from.

n.b. most of that is redundant. i'm not trying to be confusing but i do so enjoy being that.

don't have my bb password with me right now. I noticed the cool new links on theforest.org.uk to google, twitter, etc. and I saw that there seems to be a domino effect as forest fringe and total kunst now have twitter accounts as well. I wanted to ask again, would you consider deleting the twitter account and opening an identica one instead?

I really think that microblogging may become a more and more important form of communication, along with email, IM etc., and that closed networks like twitter are bad for the internet, and conversely that what identica are doing is absolutely the future. It all needs to be seen in the wider context of the struggle for free software, open networks and end-user autonomy.

I was listening to this podcast recently that had an interview with the founder of identica. It was really cool. He talked about laconica (the free software that runs identi.ca) as an open network microblogging platform, built to be federated, distributed, decentralised, not tied to a single monopoly provider. Identi.ca is different from twitter in two ways. The software that runs it is free software so you can host it on your own computer or use it to setup a rival service, and it supports the OpenMicroblogging standards so that it can interact with _other_ microblogging software. Twitter is closed in both senses. This difference is even bigger than it first seems when you realise that it's a difference of network topology, witness the recent successful DDOS attacks against twitter. You couldn't do that to an Internet full of federated laconica services like identi.ca.

He made an interesting analogy with email. In the early 90s email was like twitter or facebook today, AOL users could only send email to other AOL users and not to CompuServe users. It seems absurd today that we would have a proprietary email system, but it _could_ have turned out that way. What happened was that all of the smaller email providers started to cooperate and together they outweighed the giants, and we ended up with open protocols for email that the giants were forced to sign up to.

A counter-example is social networking. Several major closed social networking services like Facebook etc. have gotten very big with no open alternative. OpenSocial exists but came too late, and it's now an uphill battle to popularise it. I've missed out on much of the forest community's web output ever since everyone started using facebook, because I won't use it. It is really a very bad thing for the Internet. The Internet should be open. I've no doubt that the likes of Twitter, Myspace, Facebook and Flickr want it to remain closed.

Another example of a federated service like laconica is Wordpress. You can sign up to a hosted blog at wordpress.com, but you can also download the software and host it yourself or setup your own rival hosting service, or you can use some other blogging software because blogging has a whole host of open protocols associated with it (RSS, metaweblog, pingback, etc etc etc). Wordpress is now the no.1 blogging software and service in the world.

One more example: because people can contribute to laconica's open source code dozens of people have translated it into their own languages. Twitter supports English and Japanese.

I think this matters. Which side do we, as users, want to be on? Do we want an open network or a bunch of closed networks? With microblogging I reckon right now it could go one way or the other, and it's really a shame to see the forest throwing its weight in with the 800-pound gorilla in the room when it would be so easy to side with the Rebel Alliance on this one.

I guess it goes without saying that I'm not happy either with us prominently linking to both Facebook _and_ MySpace. Personally I'm in favour of simply removing these links. People who are already on facebook or myspace will find the forest on facebook or myspace, one of their 'friends' will have it written on his face or something. There's no reason for us, the forest, to be pushing people towards these corporate monopolies.

The links to Flickr and Google are different because they're useful to anybody, you can click on them and view the forest-related content without having to buy into a closed network. Flickr is a bit of a shame because there is 23hq, we have a forest group at http://www.23hq.com/photogroup/forest/ that anyone with a free 23hq account can submit photos to, it could have worked. Maybe it could still work.

i agree that setting up an identi.ca account would give us more options in what we can do with microblog postings and encourage people to look at these options, but i'm also very pragmatic in my views and the simple truth is that only a very small minority of users use identi.ca over twitter. twitter.com is where it is at for eyeballs and currently the best microblogging service for getting a message out. i don't think it would help the forest to remove it's presence on twitter or facebook, myspace, etc. at the same time, we can leave a "why the fuck are you still using just myspace/etc? but as you're here..." message to let people know our honoured and valued forest opinion on such entities in life.

i disagree with the "People who are already on facebook or myspace will find the forest on facebook or myspace". yes, some users will find the fb group/etc through friends joining or attending events, but most coming to the site will be outside that ecology/network effect and i feel that a small yet direct pointer to our presence on other services is required for them (along with a more detailed self-hosted explanation of why some services are better than others.

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hey, if you don't like it, post on the BB (so you can ask about participating for better) | MilkMiruku

Chombee, I really admire the way you eschew facebook. I'm often close to doing the same thing myself, but I stay with it for practical reasons.

I think Milk's right that we have to make the most of twit & face. But also agree with Chombee that we should big up the open alternatives. But dude, there's not much point in talking about it; you gotta just do it!

any flashes of inspiration and wit for a laconi.ca forest account username out there?

@foresttweets - lovely wordplay on the forestspeaks mailing list, but only really works on twitter... or does it? there's an argument that to 'tweet' is fast becoming like to 'google' (thank you college humour).

trying out Twitter client Twhirl which, among others, does multiple accounts (for me; @milkmiruku, @foresttweets , @tands_edinburgh) plus to laconi.ca, though if we're setting up a sync system, i'd rather it's external to the client so things are easy for future newbs to use.

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hey, if you don't like it, post on the BB (so you can ask about participating for better) | MilkMiruku

I was going to create an identica account for us but I found that one already exists and has our tweets so far copied to it: http://identi.ca/theforest

Neil, I don't understand what you're saying with the less talk more action. What I'm trying to do is to convince Milk that we should switch from Twitter to Identica. Since he doesn't agree with me it wouldn't seem right for me to just delete our twitter account and edit the website to point at identica.

Milk, I think the pragmatic argument in favour of twitter is extremely weak. Identica will give us a blend of pragmatic idealism here that I think will work out very nicely and nicely mirrors the pragmatic idealism that the forest applies to other things such as where we order our food and coffee from.

1. We don't need a microblogging account of any sort. We've existed so far without one and can continue to do so. It's a pretty obscure geek thing. Lets face it, we didn't have to sacrifice our higher ideals to pragmatism here. We saw twitter, we wanted it, and we jumped on the bandwagon with everyone else, bollocks to our ideals. The simple truth is that only a very small minority of geeks actually use twitter and would be at all likely to discover the forest through twitter. Far more people would be discovering twitter through the forest, exactly what I don't want to see the forest doing.

2. Other people don't need to be using identica, we do. Our identica updates will appear on the front page of our website for our adoring fans to see. And in the unlikely event that they don't want to miss a single forest posting, they can subscribe to our identica RSS feed and get the posts delivered to their computer, iphone, or whatever. None of this requires them to have an identica account, welcome to the open network. But maybe by using identica and proclaiming it to be awesome, so users will discover identica via the forest and start to use it. We will have done a good thing.

3. Identica is perfectly pragmatic, it's free and signing up for an account and posting to it is trivially easy.

4. I think the idea of having a facebook account but putting a screed on it about why you should not use facebook is ridiculous. It's just straightforward hypocrisy. It is like if we sold Coca Cola but ever time someone bought a can we said 'By the way we don't know why you buy this shit, they kill unionisers in Brazil. 50p please.' I think we make our point much better by simply selling organic cola. Even better when we sell Zapatista coffee and proclaim that the Zapatista's are awesome.

Also our website seriously doesn't need more pages with information about why you shouldn't use facebook etc. Our site needs to get smaller. That information is already available elsewhere and we don't need to reproduce it.

If we're gonna use facebook then just use it and don't pretend we have any higher principles about it, we don't.

I'm not saying we should delete our Facebook account by the way. I'm just saying we don't need to link to it from our website. The Twitter account I think we should delete because there is a better alternative. With Facebook there is no practical alternative, which is how things will end up with Twitter if everyone thinks 'pragmatically' about it.

5. You say that most people coming to our site will be coming to it from outside of closed networks such as twitter and facebook and we therefore need to supply links to twitter and facebook for them. Why? They have found our site, with our blog, our events listing, our identica feed, and our pages and pages of information. I think they do not need to subscribe to our twitter and facebook accounts as well. We have way too may web presences, we're overloading people with too much information. If you do that they're just gonna ignore it all.

Also I am against the forest pushing people towards twitter and facebook when they don't already use it. It is like we are saying there is more forest stuff that you're missing out on unless you accept the terms of these big commercial ventures, terms that are entirely antithetical to the forest, but lets ignore that.

I don't think we should have both a twitter account and and identica account. That's just spreading things around even more and making it even more confusing for visitors. I'm in favour of deleting the twitter account and using identica only. A lot of people would prefer to drink Coke but we don't sell Coke alongside organic cola. We have our principles and we apply them in a simple and practical way.

In general I think if we applied the pragmatic argument to everything we do we would not exist, or we would just be another Udder Belly. What is the forest for? To me it's about saying fuck you to the mainstream and doing it our own way. 'Everyone else is doing it so we should too' doesn't hold water.

Sorry for the rant, and it's nothing personal.

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I've had it with you. If I had an image of a laser gun I would absolutely position it right here in my hand...Ha! I have a real laser absolutely positioned in my hand!

In general I think if we applied the pragmatic argument to everything we do we would not exist, or we would just be another Udder Belly. What is the forest for? To me it's about saying fuck you to the mainstream and doing it our own way. 'Everyone else is doing it so we should too' doesn't hold water.

I'm starting to agree that we should replace Twitter with Identi.ca. But I'm still confused about how it all works.

I'm definitely thinking we should lose the Facebook, MySpace, Twitter etc logos from the top of the homepage. Maybe there is a place for these links somewhere on the site, but even that is questionable. If people want to find us on Google, Flikr, YouTube etc, it is not hard for them to do it themselves.

My point for you Chombee was simply that there was nothing to stop you going ahead & setting up & Identi.ca account; that you didn't need to spend time convincing everybody of its worth. But I see now how you think it's important we use it instead of Twitter, not as well as. You may be right about that. Is there any opportunity for integration between the two? I guess Twitter is into preventing that, are they?

I tried to set up an Identi.ca account for us the other day but also stumbled at coming up with a decent handle since 'forest' is taken and so are the other things I tried. But I think maybe we should just go for foresttweets again - keep it simple! Or 4est?

in trying to recover access to my milkmiruku identi.ca account, it sent me a password reset link for "theforest". whoopsy, i forgot about creating that. and setting up twitterfeed.com to cross-post messages..

thinking about it, i'd argue we don't need a microblogging account as much as we don't need a facebook group, given all events and messages for the community are now posted on the new website. the problem is that most people aren't au fait with how to aggregate an iCal or RSS feeds, so if we did delete the faceboook or twitter then we'd be hurting ourselves in regards to getting the message of our existence and happenings out.

it's way not just geeks using twitter - check a search for #edfringe for a good example of message activity relating to the fringe (i've been using the tag to advertise Forest Fringe events most days).

ouch, the coke analogy is bit of a straw man. if facebook did 10% of the shit coke did, then there would be no way we'd use it. saying that, twitter is more open than facebook in that it makes good use of RSS feeds and uses OAuth for apps. the only more progressive thing that identi.ca does differently is federation, i.e., you can add someone who has an account on another OpenMicroBlogging compatible site.

i don't agree with the argument that having both a twitter and identi.ca equates to "spreading things around even more and making it even more confusing for visitors". i see it as giving users an option - yes, it would be good if people saw the identi.ca link and thought "ooh, more open than twitter - i'll give that a go", but others are still going to stick with their twitter account.

on the issue of principals - i feel that "If we're gonna use facebook then just use it and don't pretend we have any higher principles about it, we don't." and "I'm not saying we should delete our Facebook account by the way. I'm just saying we don't need to link to it from our website." are somewhat contradictory statements.

also, why can't our website have a lot of information, as long as it's easy to navigate and update? i do not believe the majority of people have as good google-fu as you or i or neil - not that i'm saying we should reinvent the wheel, but at least talking about our preferred way of thinking along with a few hyperlinks for further reading wouldn't do us or our visitors any harm.

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hey, if you don't like it, post on the BB (so you can ask about participating for better) | MilkMiruku

I think since we don't see eye to eye on this then using both identica and twitter via this bridge is the best compromise, and already setup. Am I right in thinking that it works automatically, so that whenever you post to twitter or identica by any means it gets synced to the other one? I've also heard it said that identica has or will have a built-in twitter bridge but haven't been able to find it.

For what it's worth the coke analogy didn't imply that facebook are as bad as coke, although they are assholes (they're currently trying to patent/claim that they own the idea of crowdsourcing translations, for example).

I think allowing a forest facebook group (as if we could ever stop it or "allow" it anyway) but quietly not linking to it from our website is a lot less contradictory than having (and using, benefiting from) a facebook account with an anti-facebook message on it. I think it's maybe a good compromise. People will use facebook, they'll talk about the forest on it, post photos, make a forest group. Whatever. We can at least refrain from actively pushing more new users towards it, and it would be nice to have one less multi-millionaire corporation's logo up there next to the forest one.

The reason I'm in favour of a small forest site with less info is that it'll be less to maintain and less likely to become outdated and uncared for over time, as well as being a lot more comprehensible/less bewildering to visitors. I'm talking about static info here, not time-based info like blog entries and events postings.

I think the idea behind those links at the top of the page is a good one, I like the idea of using our site to aggregate and point to forest-related info around the web, and the google, flickr and youtube ones are clever hacks and lead to a lot of cool forest-related stuff. I like the stream of events and stuff on the front page too, it's providing info and giving the impression that the forest is an active place with lots of stuff happening.

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I've had it with you. If I had an image of a laser gun I would absolutely position it right here in my hand...Ha! I have a real laser absolutely positioned in my hand!